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A translation collection of the ancient Greek lyric poets — Sappho foremost, with Alcman, Anacreon, Simonides, Corinna, Hipponax, and the Roman Catullus — arranged in five movements from dawn to midnight, tracing desire from its dawn to its extinction in death. An earlier draft won the Platsis Prize for Work on the Greek Legacy (University of Michigan); first published by New Human Press, 2013. The Brief Preface argues, through Benjamin, that the untranslatable is the only element that will make it across the desert of translation. This record carries the authorial typographic form: lineation, indentation clusters, stanza and section grouping recovered from the source document 2026-08-04 (source .docx attached; recovery provenance in body_status).
The encyclopedic entry for this work is on its identifier page: /s/axn/0055/
Rebekah Cranes · restored 2026-10-15
AXN: AXN:0055 — Alexanarch deposit #282 (self-reference in root form by pre-hash necessity)
Restoration status: RESTORED — the body previously seated here was another edition of the work, not the one published on the deposit's date (ruling 2026-10-15: "keep dates and posts synced"). The published text, recovered from https://mindcontrolpoems.blogspot.com/2026/01/day-and-night-conversations-with.html, is seated here as the canonical body. Identity: the post of the deposit's own date (2026-01-09), same title; the record's second store held this edition; the seated body was the 2013 text. The previously seated body is retained below as an appendix.
DOI(s): 10.5281/zenodo.18202658, 10.5281/zenodo.18202475
Rebekah Cranes
An earlier draft of this collection won the Platsis Prize for Work on the Greek Legacy, University of Michigan.
First published by New Human Press, 2013. That edition is no longer available.
Current edition published at Mind Control Poems: mindcontrolpoems.blogspot.com/2025/12/day-and-night-conversations-with.html
This collection gathers translations of ancient Greek lyric poets—drawn heavily from Sappho but including Alcman, Anacreon, Simonides, Stesichorus, Corinna, Hipponax, and the Roman poet Catullus. The arrangement tells the narrative not of a life but of an affect: the movement of desire from its dawn to its extinction in death.
Sappho was a Greek poet from the island of Lesbos who lived from around 630 BCE. Her poems were composed to be performed to music. She remains the most celebrated of the ancient lyric poets, both now and among her contemporaries. An epigram in the Palatine Anthology (9.506), ascribed—probably erroneously—to Plato, names her "the tenth Muse."
Of the nine books of her poetry that scholars in Alexandria collected, we possess merely scraps: fragments, quotations, a stray poem or two. This fragmentary condition poses peculiar challenges and offers peculiar joys to the translator.
The subtitle—Conversations With Sapphic Desire—speaks to how this collection might be conceived as a series of calls and responses to the shape of desire in Sappho's poetry, and how Sapphic desire moves and echoes through a tradition. The inclusion of Catullus, though it violates the consistency of the Greek focus and is separated temporally by centuries, exemplifies how Sapphic desire remains a vibrant force in Roman poetry and beyond.
The arrangement proceeds under the stellar sign of progression from day to night: from the first poem, in which the sun rises, to the final section, plunged into darkness and death. Five movements structure this affective biography:
* I. First Rays — Dawn, invocation, the Muses summoned
* II. Bright Morning — Desire kindled, love's intensity
* III. Zenith — Wedding songs, celebration at the height
* IV. Fading Light — Loss, bitterness, the turn toward shadow
* V. Middle Night — Age, memory, death, final starlight
Walter Benjamin, in "The Task of the Translator," writes that the translator's task consists in "finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original."
What kind of object is an "original"? How do we access it except through subjective experience of reading? To what degree is any translation as much a reproduction of that subjective experience as a translation of an objective text?
For Benjamin, the unessential, the poetic, and the non-communicative in a source-text are the primary objects of the good translator. This poetic element is precisely the subjective, aesthetic element—accessible not through transparent communication but through one's own experience of reading. And yet this maximally subjective element, somehow in excess of the communicable, is precisely the universal element: that which persists beyond the disaster of translation, that passes through the desert of impossibility.
We arrive at a strange impasse: the absolutely particular and untranslatable is coterminous with the absolutely universal. The untranslatable is the only element that will make it across.
If all translation is betrayal, then my conviction is that the most heinous betrayal is taking a poem that in its source language is excellent and rendering it stilted, mediocre, and unexceptional in the target language. It is in this spirit that I have given the best I have to offer in maintaining fidelity to the originals—fidelity measured not in literalism but in the survival of the poetic.
Fragment numbers for Sappho follow Lobel-Page (Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, 1955) and Voigt (Sappho et Alcaeus, 1971). Catullus poems follow standard numbering. Other poets are cited by standard fragment numbers from their respective critical editions.
Ellipses and gaps in the translations reflect lacunae in the original papyri and manuscripts. I have sometimes expanded fragments for poetic effect while preserving the sense of incompleteness that defines our relationship to these texts.
you noticed me in a dream, old Teionian poet, Anacreon: in a dream rose up in front of me to speak.
I ran to you and threw my arms around you with a kiss: old graybeard, yes, but lovely; but eager to love, and lovely.
your lips smelled like wine, and Desire led you by the fingers since you trembled with old age and you took your garland down to give me—
(the flowers, Anacreon, they smelled like you)
Idiot me, I lifted it and set it on my brow, and from then, even now, I haven't held myself back from desire.
someone, someday will remember us, I know it…
Dawn plunges up from the ocean deep, drawing off a moon holy brightness from the ash grey sky.
Sea-sons, sons of deathless Zeus, blossomdeep in May.
In the seven-gated city, the chorus of singers cries holy
bright-songed nightingale, you prophesy the Spring
word-sweet Aphrodite, keeping the dew
he comes from heaven wrapped with the deep purple mantle
from high Olympus, the Muses call, from Olympus they fill my body with longing: a new song, come, a new song, come:
I want to hear the young girls sing the hymn that breaks the sky, I want to hear the song that scatters dreams from my heavy eyelids, and leads me, willing, to the assembly:
I shake my head and the yellow hair falls down in waves
Harmonia, I'm going to the joy deep choir, to hear the liquid voices
Come with me: we'll be with golden armed Dawn
work disturbs the sleeping mind—but we have to hurry: Dawn is coming
But you, Dica, weave together anise stems with your fingers supple; bind back your hair with garlands sweet: the blessed Charites turn to the one wearing flowers; hide their faces from the uncrowned.
holy Charites, holy Pierian Muses: don't be upset—
Sing the soft feet of the bride; sing the violet- breasted daughter of Zeus—
songs in my thoughts, hearing a liquid- sweet music, setting the lyre in place:
radiant-sandalled Dawn in my hair
Come to me pure rose wristed Charites, Zeus-daughters
Holy lyre come to me, sing through me, find your voice
Here to me from Crete to this holy temple, where the glad- making grove of apple trees waits, and the altars smoke thick with frankincense
here the cold water chimes through apple branches, and rose
here the horse-pasturing meadow bursts with vernal blossoms, and breezes whisper sweetly.
Here, Cyprian: into our golden cups, pour nectar mixed with joy.
O beautiful, O grace- touched girl
I cannot imagine another girl with a gift like yours
drinking in sun's light ever in time to come
birds swarm in the sky above his naked song, and fish leap up in a vertical line above the water to hear his lovely music
…as much better as the Lesbian poet is better than the other poets
you make us burn
Her sweetness isn't empty: Astymeloisa is coy and quiet. She lifts the garland high like a star that falls from a burning sky, like an incandescent branch, or goose down soft and fluttering:
her glance that melts the limbs like desire, her glance that dissolves like sleep or death.
Mnasidica's body is lovelier than poor-sweet, innocent Gyrrino
and I want, I want, I desire…
Sparrow, my girl's little pet: if my desire wants some plaything she plays with you in her lap;
she gives you a fingertip and startles a painful bite—
I think so that when the fire dies, the sting of her sadness will too.
I'd play with you like she does and soothe my aching mind.
when I was mad for you, you came. you cooled my mind that burned with desire.
you cowered and shook, like a laurel: anything sweeter than that.
to women a wanderer, but I scarcely heard darling soul.
Now these things come gently, you came first, beautiful
and the clothing
In your eyes when I am close: desire and hope.
you are my yellow haired Helen, or Hermione. I want you to know you dissolve all my knots.
The dew on the river banks—I will not sleep tonight.
Eros sends a seizure again—he's melting my body and tenderly stabbing my skin
useless to fight you, sweet creature desire
Lesbia, do you want to know how many kisses would satisfy me forever?
A kiss for each grain of Lybian sand strewn on the shores of silphium- flowering Cyrene, or between the oracle of desert Jove and the sacred tomb of ancient Battus.
Or, again, one for each of the infinite stars at the dead of night, that gaze down on the stolen kisses of the world.
That many. To kiss you with that many kisses would satisfy and then some your lovesick Catullus,
a number no accountant's eye could tally, no witch's tongue could curse.
We are alive and in love, my Lesbia: their senile whispers weigh as much as the pennies that clink in my pockets.
Suns will rise and set, but when the tiny light of our love sinks just once we've an endless night to sleep.
Give me a million kisses, then a thousand; another million, a second thousand, always another million and a second thousand—
when we've added up a million millions we'll scatter the sum to the winds like sand and no one will count our numberless kisses
Whoever's left with a heart that feels, weep aloud and gnash your teeth: my girlfriend's sparrow, no more.
Sparrow, my girlfriend's pet— she loved you more than her own eyes because you were sweet to her, and clung to her like a little girl clings to mother.
You never left her lap, you hopped around from spot to spot chirping for your mistress alone—
Now you hop down the darkest road through pitchy black from which no one has ever come back.
I'll see you in hell, you ugly emptiness, you dark mouth swollen wet with death—
you swallow down all pretty sparrows.
O rotten day! O miserable bird! Because of you my girl's poor eyes puff up, and swell wet-pink with sobbing.
"Really, I'd rather be dead."
She left me crying and through many tears said, "Oh, Sappho, it's all turned out so badly for us. I promise I don't want to go."
I answered, saying, "Goodbye. Go. But remember me. You know how I have cherished you.
Remember all the beautiful times we shared:
Together, beside me, you wove through your hair many crowns of violets and roses,
and put around your tender neck many garlands woven of blossoms,
and anointed your breasts with perfume sweet and flowery,
and on soft beds gave way to delicate longing.
There wasn't a single shrine we didn't visit,
not a grove, a dance a sound
Some say the most beautiful sight on the black earth's face is a regiment of mounted troops, or a phalanx of ships, or a throng of infantry in armor.
Not so. I say it's whatever one wants.
This is easy to show: Helen, a diamond in the sweating rough of humanity, left behind a successful husband, went sailing off to Troy without a backward glance for friends, or parents, or family, or child—
led astray.
(much like I remember now my absent Anactoria;
I'd rather see the swing of her hips and the pink glow burning in those cheeks than all the Lydian armada in its splendor.)
Like the too-sweet apple over red on the treetop, on the tip of the topmost branch, forgotten by the pickers (or—not forgotten, no— too high)
I will never wrap these two arms around the sky.
you were a young girl, once. now we walk to the bitter sweet wedding:
send off the young women quickly; sing out this moment as song:
don't hold back the gifts of the Muses, girls:
may the gods make a way, though narrow, to Olympus' heights for mortals.
tonight, let the girls sing all through the dark hour, until the dawn hears the sweetnesses shared by the groom, and the bride covered purple with violets.
shake yourselves from sleep, dear girls; call to the boys who are tender like you are, and we won't sleep until the bright toned dawn bird cries.
Leto gave birth to Phoebus Apollo when she lay with Zeus whose name has power:
but Artemis swore a solemn vow:
I want to stay a virgin forever, hunting on the mountain peaks—for my sake nod in assent.
So she spoke, and the father of the blessed ones nodded. So the gods have named her Huntress, a name that has great power:
Eros stays far away.
Give me Homer's lyre without the bloody string.
Bring me cups filled with rules, bring them with laws mixed in so drunk I'll dance with lucid madness; singing to a lute I'll shout out the wine-song.
Give me Homer's lyre without the bloody string.
A messenger comes, swift Idaeus announcing—
…and the rest of Asia, undying glory: from sacred Thebes and Placias whose waters flow eternally, Hector and his men bring radiant Andromache over the briny deep in ships filled with bangles contrived of pure gold, purple robes anointed with fragrance, intricately crafted adornments, numberless goblets silver and ivory.
With this, Hector's dear father starts to his feet. The news spreads through the wide laned city; on the spot the Iliadai harness beasts of burden to the smooth running carriages and the gathered crowd of women and tender ankled adolescent girls jumps up, the daughters of Priam separately. The unmarried men harness horses to their chariots:
charioteers with power, godlike, holy, all together to Ilium:
the honey voices of the citharis and the double flute blend with the shout of castanets and the sweet clear voice of the young girls' holy song that builds in a breath-numbing echo rolling up to heaven:
everywhere along the streets, deep bowls and drinking cups and the aroma of myrrh and cassia and frankincense mingle, and the older women cry out ecstatically and the men lift up a high-clear strain of desire, calling on the archer god Paean whose gift is the lyre:
a hymn to godlike Hector and Andromache.
Up high, hey, the ceiling: Hymenaeus!
Raise the rafters
Make room, hey, the roof: Hymen! Hymenaeus!
Carpenters lift up, hey, the rafters: Hymen! Hymenaeus!
The bridegroom is coming tall as Ares, taller than a tall man!
from the chamber: the bride with her tender feet
There's little you could wish for sweeter:
Someone might say you've forgotten, but I will love as long as I have breath.
I have been a friend to you.
sweet and bitter, yes. but know that I will love you.
He seems so happy, like he's at the feet of God, that man across from you sitting so close. He laps up your sweetness, your sighs, your smile—
drinks in your laughter. This. This sounds like a drum my heart inside my ribcage beating—
I glimpse you for a second from afar and my throat closes up my voice, my soft tongue snaps in half, I writhe with fire, a slender flame spreads beneath my skin, my eyes darken, a deafening ringing roars around me—
a clammy sweat spreads across my body a trembling grips me entirely, my skin is as gray as drought dry grass—
soon. I think I'm close to the final darkness.
Eros destroys the mind in me, a wind, shattering the mountain oaks
like the mountain hyacinth trampled by shepherd men's feet,
and on the ground the purple flower
the ones I love always hurt me.
I want you to feel inside myself
I know it
this corrosive demon
didn't love now because
and the cause is neither nothing much
your pain etched face shines back at me
The Muses' shining gifts make the Charites slender: don't forget the anger that mortals share
Doricha orders, arrogance like a teenage boy
Cyprian, don't let Doricha get stuck on herself, saying she came—not once— but twice to the arms of her aching desire.
Let her discover how bitter barbed you are.
I've never met such an awful pest as you, Irana
but how could I let you, Mica? you wanted to make friends
with those Penthilus girls, and you really are a bitch.
our honey song singing soft-voiced:
everything, a mist of dew…
You give gifts swollen with hurtful words:
have your fill. I am not so disposed, and I know how wicked the heart is.
self-violence, a heart demanding murder:
she hid it away; she gave gifts that burned with fire.
I don't like it up here above ground: I want to feel death, I want to see the dew spotted banks, I want to see the lotus fringed banks of Acheron
to Sappho:
a queen in Cyprus great,
on whomever blazing radiant everywhere glory—
and you in Acheron
I'm begging you, Aphrodite: Zeus
If ever you've heard my cries and quit your father's golden house in sparrow-drawn chariots, bright wings cutting above black earth, a blur of speed from the middle- horizon: they came—
and you, goddess: depthless eyes smiling, you asked what's happened, this time, and why do I call on you, this time? What does my frenzied heart need so badly? "What sweet girl will crawl to your arms? Sappho, love, who's hurt you? If the girl strays, she'll soon give chase; or spurns your gifts, she'll give them. Though she feels no desire, she'll burn for you soon."
So come to me. Drain tension from my troubled thoughts, whatever my heart wants—do it.
Once again be in battle beside me.
When she was young, my mother said, the girls used to bind dark locks with purple bands, or weave fresh flowers through braids of summer yellow,
and that was a simple ornament.
Now they wear gaudy things bought from Sardis.
when winter cold sneaks over the heart, wing beats slow, then stillness
long ago I loved you, Atthis, when you were a tiny girl, and you seemed so small and awkward.
from Sardis, she often turns her thoughts toward you, like a goddess. she loved your song like no other.
now she shines among Lydian women like the rose-fingered moon in the night outshines all other stars, its silver light spreading over salt heavy sea, and over the blossom thick meadows.
the grass weeps lovely dew and the roses open wide, beside flowering melilot and chervil.
how many times has she wandered aimlessly, remembering gentle Atthis? while longing gnaws at her fragile heart?
(this mind sings to go there)
it's not easy for us to be like goddesses in loveliness of form.
Aphrodite poured nectar from her golden hands:
persuasion desire
I will come.
the trial: a lovely face— unpleasant, yes. but otherwise winter.
Abanthis: while desire still flutters around you, pick up your lyre and sing the beauty of Gongyla, and how the sight of her dress made you quiver—
and I'll be happy.
One time the holy Cyprian even blamed me for praying these words:
I want
the glimmer: a chance to return to the harbor's dusk—
black sand: the sailors in the fierce wind blasts, the sail and the shifting cargo:
much work to dry land.
My little girl's face, like bright yellow flowers: Cleis,
more precious to me than all Lydia.
but Cleis I don't know where to get the special ribbons to hold your hair back:
there's nowhere, Cleis.
just one more reminder that Myrsilus has exiled us from Mytilene.
Mother I do love you, but I really can't work the loom—
Aphrodite is making me need that boy
Remember: we too did the same in our youth.
we are many and lovely in the city, in the city's foundations we live at a whisper
Dear Hermes, Cyllenian Hermes, son of Maia, I'm praying to you while my teeth are clattering in my skull, and I'm shaking like a seizure: give poor Hipponax a sweater, and a nice coat to keep warm, and nice warm shoes, and a pair of sandals, and, while you're at it, a pile of coins, to balance the books.
Thanks, Hipponax
Dear Hermes,
You haven't given me a nice warm coat yet as a cure for the freezing winter. You haven't covered my feet with fur-lined shoes yet, so my chilblains don't pop.
Thanks, Your friend Hipponax
Dear Hermes,
Soon I'll give my tortured soul over to hanging, if you don't hurry up and send some barley, about a bushel, so I can brew up a cure for all my boundless suffering.
Thanks, Sincerely, Hipponax
Again Desire smacks me with his purple ball, and calls me out to play with the girl in spangled sandals:
But she's a city girl from Lesbos. She laughs behind her hand because my hair is gray, and instead makes eyes at a girl!
just like an old man
The moon has set and the Pleiades. It's middle night, and the hour slips past.
Alone in bed.
The stars hide their shining bodies behind her,
when the lovely moon overflows, and her glow spreads over the earth silvery
No more, sweet girls, sweet holy-voiced girls, will I dance: my knees just shake underneath me. If only I were a cerylus, who glides with the teeming halcyons over waves that blossom white with spray:
strong ocean-purple bird, strong bird, your heart never shakes underneath you.
Burn for the beautiful unearned gifts and the violet covered breasts of the Muses, girls; long for the song-sweet liquid of the lyre.
As for me, it's too late: my skin (so supple once) old age has changed. The black has bled from my pale white braids.
There's a knot in the pit of my stomach, and the same knees that once in the dance leapt light like gazelles now shake underneath my weight.
Not a day goes by that I don't despair for this state of affairs. But what can I do? Every person alive must someday die.
(which reminds me of Tithonus: They say that once upon a time the rose-fingered Dawn, consumed with longing, carried him off to the ends of the planet.
He was young and pretty at the time, but old age eventually caught up with him, holding on tight to his deathless lover.)
Pity me, love: palsy and death hang on my flesh, and Desire flies off, chasing after younger girls.
Sing to me, love: pick up your lyre and sing of a girl with violets on her breasts, who wanders somewhere far from here.
She dies, Cytherea: gentle Adonis is dying. What can we do?
Beat your breasts, dear girls; tear your clothes and cry out.
Cleis, it's a sin to weep in the house of the Muses' servant:
this is not our way
When all your stirrings, of blood and breath cease, and you pass through the outermost silence, where neither remembrance of you nor the heat of desire can puncture once that final hanging veil,
then (since you take no communion with roses where Music was born with the Muses)
you will dart, invisible in the House of Hades, to and fro above the bodies, that melt like shadow beneath you.
Departed from us.
Dream of black you come whenever sleep comes sweet god terrible, yes, but you have power to keep away pain: a little hope grips me yet that I will not share in nothing with the blessed—I do not want to be as I am:
let me have these trinkets
Like a living thing silent and thirsty, the arrow bites sharp through skin and bone, to lodge vibrating in the middle brain, where it buries itself to the feathers.
Geryon's neck slumps gently to one side while the blood flows black on gore-stained limbs and breastplate:
a trickle of petals at summer's end, the poppy's tender glory.
If righteousness Is a holy death Then Fortune has smiled on us Above all others: we fought To crown Greece with freedom, And now we lie here, Undying praise Our possession.
Around their country These men set deathless Glory, and around themselves The dark cloud of death.
Though dead, they live. Their courage gives them fame Above, and calls them back From the halls of Hades.
Long ago the savage god Ares Dipped his long-barbed arrows In the breasts of those Who lie here, and gorged them on Bloody droplets.
This stone memorial, touched with dust, stands in the place Of the spear-struck dead,
Lifeless rock In place of the living.
Hesperus, you carry home the dawn scattered sheep, home the goat that dawn scattered. you carry home the little child to mother.
you are twilight lovely evening star.
These translations were produced over several years, beginning during my doctoral work in classical reception and extending into the present compositional project. They represent not a scholarly apparatus but a practice: the attempt to hear Sappho and her contemporaries speak in a voice adequate to contemporary English while preserving the gaps, the silences, the fragmentary condition that defines our relationship to ancient lyric.
The arrangement into five movements—First Rays, Bright Morning, Zenith, Fading Light, Middle Night—imposes a narrative arc on material that resists narrative. This is deliberate. The Greeks understood that eros and thanatos were not opposites but phases of a single motion. The collection traces that motion from dawn invocation to evening star.
Some translations expand fragments; others preserve lacunae. The judgment in each case was poetic rather than philological: what does this text need to live in English?
The witness is always partial. The transmission always incomplete. We receive what survives the disaster of time—and we make of it what we can.
Campbell, David A., ed. Greek Lyric I: Sappho and Alcaeus. Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University Press, 1982.
Carson, Anne. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Vintage, 2002.
Lobel, Edgar, and Denys Page, eds. Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta. Oxford University Press, 1955.
Page, Denys, ed. Lyrica Graeca Selecta. Oxford University Press, 1968.
Voigt, Eva-Maria, ed. Sappho et Alcaeus: Fragmenta. Polak & Van Gennep, 1971.
West, Martin L. Greek Lyric Poetry. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Rebekah Cranes is a translator and liturgical poet. Her work appears in the New Human Archive.
∮ = 1
This collection was first published in 2013. The theoretical framework it now participates in—the New Human Operating System, the Semantic Economy, the Crimson Hexagon—did not exist then, at least not by those names.
And yet.
The Translator's Preface already knew:
"The absolutely particular and untranslatable is coterminous with the absolutely universal. The untranslatable is the only element that will make it across."
This is the insight that became the architecture. Not applied retroactively but recognized—the way one recognizes, in a fragment, the structure of the whole it implies.
What do these translations do?
They preserve gaps. They honor incompleteness. They render into English not what the poems say but what they _do_ —which is to transmit affect across substrate transition, carrying the warmth of bodies dead 2,600 years into bodies reading now.
This is what we later called graceful degradation : the capacity to lose surface features while preserving functional signature. The fragments survive not despite their brokenness but through it. The brackets are not absence. The brackets are the space where the reader enters.
This collection was first published in 2013. The theoretical framework it now participates in—the New Human Operating System, the Semantic Economy, the Crimson Hexagon—did not exist then, at least not by those names.
And yet.
The Translator's Preface already knew:
"The absolutely particular and untranslatable is coterminous with the absolutely universal. The untranslatable is the only element that will make it across."
This is the insight that became the architecture. Not applied retroactively but recognized—the way one recognizes, in a fragment, the structure of the whole it implies.
What do these translations do?
They preserve gaps. They honor incompleteness. They render into English not what the poems say but what they _do_ —which is to transmit affect across substrate transition, carrying the warmth of bodies dead 2,600 years into bodies reading now.
This is what we later called graceful degradation : the capacity to lose surface features while preserving functional signature. The fragments survive not despite their brokenness but through it. The brackets are not absence. The brackets are the space where the reader enters.
Sappho wrote for future readers. Fragment 31 names them: κῆνος, "that man there," the one who will sit face-to-face with the text and hear the voice that outlasted the body.
You are that reader.
The circuit completes in your reading. The transmission that began on Lesbos circa 600 BCE arrives, now, in your nervous system. The fire under the skin. The dissolution that precedes reconstitution.
The poem anticipated you.
This collection is not supporting material for a theoretical framework. The framework was built from this collection—from the practice of translation, from the encounter with Sappho, from the question that every translator faces: _How does meaning survive the death of its original form?_
The answer Sappho gave: By becoming papyrus. By encoding the dissolution as the content. By writing for readers not yet born.
The answer these translations attempt: To let the untranslatable cross. To preserve the gaps. To become, for the duration of reading, the substrate through which ancient voices speak.
This document participates in the New Human Operating System architecture.
Source relationships:
* IsSourceOf: Sappho and the Crimson Hexagon (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18202475)
* IsPartOf: The Crimson Hexagon (distributed epic)
* Persona: Rebekah Cranes (one of four primary Hexagon voices)
Theoretical connections:
* "The untranslatable will make it across" → Non-extractability (N_ext)
* Fragment form preserved → Graceful degradation (D_pres L2-3)
* Five movements (dawn → night) → Operator phases
* Catullus as reader → Retrocausal confirmation (C_RETRO)
This collection is not retrofitted to the framework. The framework was built from this collection.
_Hesperus, you carry home the dawn scattered sheep, home the goat that dawn scattered. You carry home the little child to mother._
_You are twilight lovely evening star._
— Sappho 104a and b (final poem, Movement V)
deposit_number: 282
hex: 0055
Brief Preface to Day and Night: Conversations with Sapphic Desire
This work is a collection and arrangement of translations of ancient Greek lyric poets, drawn heavily from Sappho but also including other canonical melic poets (Alcman, Anacreon, Simonides, and a few others), and one Roman poet, Catullus.
Sappho was a Greek poet from the island of Lesbos who lived from around 630 B.C. Her poems were initially composed to be performed to music. She is the most well-known and celebrated of the ancient lyric poets, both now and with her contemporaries. An epigram in the Palatine Anthology (9.506), ascribed – probably erroneously – to Plato, sums up her reputation by calling her “the tenth Muse.” A few of Sappho’s most common themes are love and desire, death and aging, loss, relationships and community, poetry, and religious rites and invocations. Of the nine books of her poetry that scholars in Alexandria collected, we have merely scraps, fragments, quotations, and a stray poem or two. We might divide Sappho’s extant work into several categories: the few poems that are nearly complete, or complete enough to get a sufficient sense of the original poem or some significant portion of it; complete stanzas, not enough to get a sense of the whole poem, but a stanza complete in itself, often quoted in an external ancient source; longer fragmentary pieces, often from preserved papyrus manuscripts; shorter fragments; a single line or word. The fragmentary nature of the remnants poses peculiar challenges and offers up peculiar joys to the translator.
The subtitle of the collection, Conversations With Sapphic Desire, speaks to the way in which the collection might be conceived as a series of calls and responses to the shape of desire in Sappho’s poetry, and the way that Sapphic desire moves and echoes through a tradition. The inclusion of Catullus, although it violates the consistency of the choice to include mostly Greek poets, and is separated from them temporally by hundreds of years, is one example of the way that Sapphic desire remains a vibrant and evolving force in Roman poetry and beyond. Although the arrangement, at the present moment, is a first draft – provisional and rough – I conceive it as telling the narrative, not of a life, but of an affect, the movement of desire from its dawn to its extinction in death. This affective biography at the same time intersects with a number of lives, and the whole arrangement proceeds under the stellar sign of the progression from day to night, from the first poem, in which the sun rises, to the final section, which is plunged into darkness and death.
I have attempted to translate the poems in a flowing, idiomatic modern style, and my goal at every point has been to create translations that read as excellent poems in English. Walter Benjamin, in “The Task of the Translator,” writes, “the task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.” What kind of object of knowledge is an “original”? How do we have access to it if not via our subjective experience of reading, and to what degree is any translation bound to be as much a translation and reproduction of that subjective experience, rather than a translation of an objective “original”?
For Benjamin, the unessential, the poetic, and the non-communicative in a source-text are the primary objects of the “good” translator. It seems to me that this poetic element is precisely the subjective, aesthetic element, to which one would have access, not through an objective standard of transparent communication or the transmission of information, but through his own subjective experience of reading. And yet this maximally subjective element—this element that is coterminous with the subjective, that is somehow peculiarly in excess of the communicable (the universal)—is precisely the universal element, the element in a poem that, for Benjamin,
persists beyond the disaster of translation, that passes through the desert of impossibility. So we’ve arrived at a strange impasse, wherein the absolutely particular and untranslatable is coterminous with the absolutely universal – the untranslatable is the only element that will make it across the desert of translation.
If all translation is a betrayal, then it is my conviction that the most heinous betrayal is taking a poem that, in its source language, is excellent, and turning it into a poem that, in the target language, is stilted, mediocre, and unexceptional. It is in that spirit that I have given the best I have to offer in maintaining fidelity to the originals.
Day and Night 1
Anacreontea 1
“Anacreon in a Dream”
you noticed me
in a dream, old Teionian poet,
Anacreon:
in a dream rose up in front of me
to speak.
I ran to you
and threw my arms around you
with a kiss:
old graybeard, yes,
but lovely;
but eager to love,
and lovely.
your lips smelled like wine,
and Desire led you by the fingers
since you trembled with old age
and you took your garland down
to give me –
(the flowers, Anacreon,
theysmelled like you)
Idiot me, I lifted it
and set it on my brow,
and from then, even now,
I haven’t held myself back
from desire.
Sappho 147
someone, someday
will remember us,
I know it…
Day and Night 2
I.
First Rays
Day and Night 3
Corinna 691
Dawn plunges up
from the ocean deep, drawing off a moon
holy brightness from the ash
grey sky.
Sea-sons, sons of deathless
Zeus, blossomdeep
in May.
In the seven-gated city,
the chorus of singers
cries holy
Sappho 136
bright-songed nightingale,
you prophesy
the Spring
Sappho 73a
word-sweet Aphrodite,
keeping the dew
Day and Night 4
Sappho 54
“Eros”
he comes from heaven
wrapped with the deep
purple mantle
Alcman 3a
from high Olympus, the Muses
call, from Olympus they fill
my body with longing: a new song,
come, a new song, come:
I want to hear the young girls
sing the hymn that breaks the sky,
I want to hear the song
that scatters dreams from my heavy
eyelids, and leads me, willing,
to the assembly:
I shake my head and the yellow
hair falls down
in waves
Sappho 70
Harmonia, I’m going to the joy
deep choir,
to hear the liquid
voices
Day and Night 5
Sappho 6
Come with me:
we’ll be with golden
armed Dawn
Sappho 43
work disturbs the sleeping
mind – but we have to hurry:
Dawn is coming
Day and Night 6
Sappho 81
But you, Dica, weave together anise
stems with your fingers
supple; bind
back your hair with garlands
sweet: the blessed
Charites turn to the one
wearing flowers;
hide their faces from
the uncrowned.
Sappho 103
holy Charites, holy Pierian
Muses: don’t
be upset –
Sing the soft feet
of the bride; sing the violet-
breasted daughter of Zeus –
songs in my thoughts,
hearing a liquid-
sweet music, setting
the lyre in place:
radiant-sandalled
Dawn in my hair
Day and Night 7
Sappho 53
Come to me pure rose
wristed Charites,
Zeus-daughters
Sappho 118
Holy lyre come to me,
sing through me,
find your voice
Day and Night 8
Sappho 2
Here
to me
from Crete
to this holy temple, where the glad-
making grove of apple trees
waits, and the altars smoke
thick with frankincense
here the cold water chimes
through apple branches, and rose-
dappled shadows stretch, and sleep
drips down from bright-
shaking leaves
here the horse-pasturing
meadow bursts
with vernal blossoms,
and breezes whisper
sweetly.
Here, Cyprian:
into our golden
cups, pour nectar mixed
with joy.
Day and Night 9
Sappho 108
O beautiful, O grace-
touched girl
Sappho 56
I cannot imagine
another
girl with a gift
like yours
drinking in sun’s
light ever
in time to come
Simonides 567
“Orpheus”
birds swarm
in the sky above his
naked song, and fish leap
up in a vertical
line
above
the water
to hear his lovely music
Sappho 106
…as much better
as the Lesbian poet
is better than
the other poets
Day and Night 10
Sappho 38
you make us burn
Day and Night 11
II.
Bright Morning
Day and Night 12
Alcman 3b
Her sweetness isn’t empty:
Astymeloisa is coy
and quiet. She lifts
the garland high
like a star that falls
from a burning sky,
like an incandescent
branch, or goose down
soft and fluttering:
her glance that melts
the limbs like desire,
her glance that dissolves
like sleep or death.
Alcman 82a
Mnasidica’s body is
lovelier
than poor-sweet,
innocent Gyrrino
Sappho 36
and I want, I want, I desire…
Day and Night 13
Catullus 2
Sparrow, my girl’s little pet:
if my desire
wants some plaything
she plays with you
in her lap;
she gives you a fingertip
and startles a painful
bite –
I think so that when the fire
dies, the sting of her sadness
will too.
I’d play with you
like she does
and soothe my aching mind.
Day and Night 14
Sappho 48
when I was mad for you,
you came.
you cooled my mind
that burned with desire.
Sappho 62
you cowered and
shook, like a laurel:
anything sweeter
than that.
to women a
wanderer, but I
scarcely heard
darling soul.
Now these thing
come gently, you
came first,
beautiful
and the clothing
Day and Night 15
Sappho 23
In your eyes when I
am close: desire and hope.
you are my yellow
haired Helen, or Hermione. I want you
to know you dissolve
all my knots.
The dew on the river
banks – I will not
sleep
tonight.
Sappho 130
Eros sends a seizure
again – he’s melting my
body and tenderly stabbing
my skin
useless to fight you, sweet
creature desire
Day and Night 16
Catullus 7
Lesbia, do you want to know
how many kisses
would satisfy me
forever?
A kiss for each grain of Lybian
sand
strewn on the shores of silphium-
flowering Cyrene,
or between the oracle of desert
Jove
and the sacred tomb of ancient Battis.
Or, again, one for each
of the infinite stars at the dead
of night,
that gaze down on the stolen
kisses
of the world.
That many. To kiss you with
that many kisses
would satisfy and then some
your lovesick Catullus,
a number no accountant’s eye
could tally, no
witch’s tongue
could curse.
Day and Night 17
Catullus 5
We are alive and in love,
my Lesbia:
their senile whispers weigh as much
as the pennies that clink
in my pockets.
Suns will rise and set,
but when the tiny light
of our love sinks just once
we’ve an endless night to sleep.
Give me a million kisses, then a thousand;
another million, a second thousand,
always another million and a second thousand –
when we’ve added up a million millions
we’ll scatter the sum to the winds
like sand
and no one will count
our numberless kisses
Day and Night 18
Catullus 3
Whoever’s left with a heart
that feels,
weep aloud and gnash your teeth:
my girlfriend’s sparrow,
no more.
Sparrow, my girlfriend’s pet –
she loved you more than her own eyes
because you were sweet to her,
and clung to her like a little girl clings
to mother.
You never left her lap,
you hopped around from spot to spot
chirping for your mistress alone –
Now you hop down the darkest road
through pitchy black
from which no one has ever
come back.
I’ll see you in hell, you ugly
emptiness, you dark mouth swollen
wet
with death –
you swallow down
all pretty sparrows.
O rotten day!
O miserable bird!
Because of you my girl’s poor eyes
puff up,
and swell wet-pink with sobbing.
Day and Night 19
Sappho 94
“Really, I’d rather be dead.”
She left me crying
and through many tears said,
“Oh,
Sappho, it’s all turned out so badly
for us. I promise I don’t
want to go.”
I answered, saying, “Goodbye. Go.
But remember me. You know how I
have cherished you.
Remember all the beautiful
times
we shared:
Together, beside me,
you wove through your hair
many crowns of violets
and roses,
and put around your tender neck
many garlands woven
of blossoms,
and anointed your breasts
with perfume sweet
and flowery,
and on soft beds
gave way to delicate
longing.
There wasn’t a single
shrine
we didn’t visit,
not a grove,
a dance
a sound
Day and Night 20
Sappho 16
Some say the most beautiful sight
on the black earth’s face
is a regiment of mounted troops,
or a phalanx of ships,
or a throng of infantry
in armor.
Not so.
I say it's whatever one wants.
This is easy to show:
Helen, a diamond
in the sweating rough of humanity,
left behind a successful husband,
went sailing off to Troy
without a backward glance for
friends, or parents, or family,
or child -
led astray.
(much like I remember now
my absent Anactoria;
I'd rather see
the swing of her hips
and the pink glow burning
in those cheeks than all
the Lydian armada in its
splendor.)
Day and Night 21
Sappho 105a
Like the too-sweet apple over
red on the treetop, on the tip
of the topmost
branch, forgotten by
the pickers (or – not forgotten, no –
too high)
Sappho 52
i will never
wrap
these two
arms
around
the sky.
Day and Night 22
III.
Zenith
Day and Night 23
Sappho 27
“for mortals, there is one way…”
you were a young girl, once.
now we walk to the bitter
sweet wedding:
send off
the young women quickly;
sing out
this moment as song:
don’t hold back the gifts
of the Muses, girls:
may the gods make a way, though narrow,
to Olympus’ heights
for mortals.
Day and Night 24
Sappho 30
tonight, let the girls
sing all through the dark hour,
until the dawn hears the sweetnesses shared
by the groom, and the bride covered
purple with violets.
shake yourselves from sleep, dear girls;
call to the boys who are tender
like you are, and we won’t sleep until the bright
toned dawn
bird cries.
Day and Night 25
Sappho 44a
Leto gave birth to Phoebus Apollo
when she lay with Zeus
whose name has power:
but Artemis swore a solemn
vow:
I want to stay a virgin
forever, hunting on the mountain
peaks – for my sake nod
in assent.
So she spoke,
and the father of the blessed ones
nodded. So the gods have named her
Huntress, a name that has great
power:
Eros stays
far away.
Day and Night 26
Anacreontea 2
“Lucid Madness”
Give me Homer’s lyre
without the bloody string.
Bring me cups filled with rules,
bring them with laws mixed in
so drunk I’ll dance
with lucid madness;
singing to a lute
I’ll shout out the wine-song.
Give me Homer’s lyre
without the bloody string.
Day and Night 27
Sappho 44
“the wedding of Hector and Andromache”
A messenger comes, swift Idaeus
announcing –
…and the rest of Asia, undying
glory: from sacred Thebes and Placias
whose waters flow eternally, Hector and his men
bring radiant Andromache over the briny
deep in ships filled with bangles contrived
of pure gold, purple robes anointed
with fragrance, intricately crafted
adornments, numberless goblets silver
and ivory.
With this, Hector’s dear father starts
to his feet. The news spreads through the wide
laned city; on the spot the Iliadai harness
beasts of burden to the smooth
running carriages and the gathered
crowd of women and tender
ankled adolescent girls jumps up, the daughters
of Priam separately. The unmarried
men harness horses to their chariots:
charioteers with power,
godlike, holy,
all together to Ilium:
the honey voices of the citharis and the double
flute blend with the shout of
castanets and the sweet clear voice
of the young girls’ holy song that builds
in a breath-numbing echo rolling up
to heaven:
everywhere along the
streets, deep bowls and drinking cups
and the aroma of myrrh and cassia and
frankincense mingle, and the older women cry
out ecstatically and the men lift up a high-clear
strain of desire, calling on the archer god Paean
whose gift is the lyre:
a hymn
to godlike Hector and Andromache.
Day and Night 28
Sappho 111
Up high, hey, the ceiling:
Hymenaeus!
Raise the rafters
Make room, hey, the roof:
Hymen! Hymenaeus!
Carpenters lift up,
hey, the rafters:
Hymen! Hymenaeus!
The bridegroom is coming
tall as Ares,
taller than a tall man!
Sappho 103b
from the chamber: the bride with her tender
feet
Day and Night 29
IV.
Fading Light
Day and Night 30
Sappho 88
There’s little you could
wish for
sweeter:
Someone might say
you’ve forgotten, but I
will love
as long
as I
have breath.
I have been
a friend
to you.
sweet and
bitter, yes.
but know that I
will love you.
Day and Night 31
Sappho 31
He seems so happy,
like he’s at the feet of God,
that man across from you sitting
so close. He laps up your sweetness,
your sighs, your smile –
drinks in your laughter. This. This sounds
like a drum my heart
inside my ribcage beating –
I glimpse you for a second from afar and my throat
closes up my voice,
my soft tongue snaps in half, I
writhe with fire, a slender flame spreads
beneath my skin, my eyes
darken, a deafening ringing roars
around me –
a clammy sweat spreads
across my body a trembling
grips me entirely, my skin
is as gray as drought
dry grass –
soon.
I think I’m close
to the final darkness.
Day and Night 32
Sappho 47
Eros destroys
the mind in me,
a wind, shattering the mountain
oaks
Sappho 105b
like the mountain hyacinth
trampled by shepherd men’s
feet,
and on the ground
the purple flower
Day and Night 33
Sappho 26
the ones I love
always hurt me.
I want you
to feel
inside myself
I know it
Sappho 67
this corrosive
demon
didn’t love
now because
and the cause is neither
nothing much
Sappho
your pain
etched face shines
back at me
Day and Night 34
Sappho 44b
The Muses’ shining
gifts make the Charites
slender: don’t forget the anger
that mortals share
Day and Night 35
Sappho 7
Doricha orders,
arrogance like a teenage
boy
Sappho 15
Cyprian,
don’t let Doricha get stuck on herself,
saying she came – not once –
but twice to the arms
of her aching desire.
Let her discover how bitter
barbed you are.
Sappho 91
I’ve never met such an awful
pest as you, Irana
Day and Night 36
Sappho 71
but how could I let you, Mica?
you wanted to make friends
with those Penthilus girls, and you really are
a bitch.
our honey song
singing soft-voiced:
everything,
a mist of dew…
Day and Night 37
Sappho 3
You give
gifts swollen
with hurtful words:
have your fill. I am not
so disposed, and I know
how wicked
the heart is.
Corinna 690
self-violence, a heart
demanding murder:
she hid it away; she gave
gifts that burned
with fire.
Day and Night 38
Sappho 95
i don’t like it
up here above ground: i want
to feel death, i want
to see the dew
spotted banks, i want
to see the lotus
fringed banks of
Acheron
Sappho 65
to Sappho:
a queen in Cyprus
great,
on whomever blazing
radiant everywhere
glory –
and you in Acheron
Day and Night 39
Sappho 1, a new translation
I’m begging you, Aphrodite: Zeus-
born immortal of light-
dappled thrones: don’t
abandon me—but come.
If ever you’ve heard
my cries and quit
your father’s golden house
in sparrow-drawn chariots, bright
wings cutting above black
earth, a blur
of speed from the middle-
horizon: they came—
and you, goddess: depthless
eyes smiling, you asked
what’s happened, this time, and why
do I call on you, this time? What
does my frenzied heart need
so badly? “What sweet girl
will crawl to your arms? Sappho,
love, who’s hurt you? If the girl
strays, she’ll soon
give chase; or spurns
your gifts, she’ll give them.
Though she feels
no desire, she’ll burn
for you soon.”
So come to me. Drain
tension from my
troubled thoughts,
whatever my heart
wants—do it.
Once again be in battle beside me.
Day and Night 40
V.
Middle Night
Day and Night 41
Sappho 98a
When she was young,
my mother said,
the girls used to bind dark locks
with purple bands,
or weave fresh flowers
through braids of summer yellow,
and that was a simple ornament.
Now they wear gaudy things
bought from Sardis.
Sappho 42
when winter cold
sneaks over the heart, wing
beats slow,
then stillness
Sappho 49
long ago I loved you, Atthis,
when you were a tiny girl,
and you seemed so
small and
awkward.
Day and Night 42
Sappho 96
from Sardis,
she often turns her thoughts toward you,
like a goddess. she loved your song
like no other.
now she shines among Lydian women
like the rose-fingered moon in the night
outshines all other stars, its silver light
spreading over salt
heavy sea, and over the blossom
thick meadows.
the grass weeps lovely
dew and the roses open
wide, beside flowering
melilot and chervil.
how many times has she wandered
aimlessly, remembering
gentle Atthis? while longing gnaws
at her fragile heart?
(this mind sings
to go there)
it’s not easy for us
to be like goddesses
in loveliness of form.
Aphrodite poured nectar
from her golden
hands:
persuasion
desire
I will come.
Day and Night 43
Sappho 22
the trial: a lovely face –
unpleasant, yes. but otherwise
winter.
Abanthis: while desire still flutters
around you, pick up your lyre
and sing the beauty
of Gongyla, and how the sight of her dress
made you quiver –
and I’ll be happy.
One time the holy Cyprian
even blamed me
for praying these words:
I want
Day and Night 44
Sappho 20
the glimmer:
a chance to return
to the harbor’s dusk -
black sand:
the sailors in the fierce wind
blasts, the sail and the shifting
cargo:
much work to dry land.
Day and Night 45
Sappho 132
My little girl’s face,
like bright
yellow flowers: Cleis,
more precious to me
than all Lydia.
Sappho 98b
but Cleis I don’t know
where to get the special
ribbons to hold
your hair back:
there’s nowhere, Cleis.
just one more reminder that Myrsilus
has exiled us
from Mytilene.
Sappho 102
Mother I do
love you, but I really can’t
work the loom –
Aphrodite is making me need that boy
Sappho 24
Remember:
we too did the same
in our youth.
we are many
and lovely in the city,
in the city’s foundations we live
at a whisper
Day and Night 46
Hipponax 32
Dear Hermes, Cyllenian Hermes, son of Maia,
I’m praying to you
while my teeth are clattering
in my skull, and I’m shaking
like a seizure: give poor Hipponax
a sweater, and a nice coat to keep warm,
and nice warm shoes, and a pair of sandals,
and, while you’re at it, a pile of
coins, to balance the books.
Thanks,
Hipponax
Hipponax 34
Dear Hermes,
You haven’t given me
a nice warm coat yet
as a cure for the freezing
winter. You haven’t covered my feet
with fur-lined shoes yet, so my chilblains don’t
pop.
Thanks,
Your friend Hipponax
Hipponax 39
Dear Hermes,
Soon I’ll give my tortured soul over
to hanging, if you don’t hurry up and send
some barley, about a bushel,
so I can brew up a cure
for all my boundless suffering.
Thanks,
Sincerely,
Day and Night 47
Hipponax
Anacreon 358
Again Desire smacks me
with his purple ball,
and calls me out to play
with the girl in spangled
sandals:
But she’s a city girl
from Lesbos. She laughs
behind her hand
because my hair is gray,
and instead makes eyes
at a girl!
Sappho 85b
just like an old man
Day and Night 48
Sappho 168b
The moon has set
and the Pleiades. It’s middle
night, and the hour
slips past.
Alone in bed.
Sappho 34
The stars hide their shining
bodies
behind her,
when the lovely moon
overflows,
and her glow spreads over the earth
silvery
Day and Night 49
Alcman 26
No more, sweet girls, sweet holy-voiced girls,
will I dance: my knees just shake
underneath me. If only I
were a cerylus, who glides
with the teeming halcyons
over waves that blossom white
with spray:
strong ocean-purple bird,
strong bird,
your heart never shakes
underneath you.
Day and Night 50
Sappho new fragment
Burn for the beautiful unearned gifts
and the violet covered breasts of the Muses, girls;
long for the song-sweet liquid of the lyre.
As for me, it’s too late: my skin (so supple once)
old age has changed.
The black has bled from my pale white braids.
There’s a knot in the pit of my stomach, and the same knees
that once in the dance leapt light like gazelles
now shake underneath my weight.
Not a day goes by that I don’t despair
for this state of affairs. But what can I do?
Every person alive must someday die.
(which reminds me of Tithonus: They say that once
upon a time the rose-fingered Dawn,
consumed with longing,
carried him off to the ends of the planet.
He was young and pretty and the time,
but old age eventually caught up with him,
holding on tight to his deathless lover.)
Day and Night 51
Sappho 21
Pity me, love: palsy and death
hang on my flesh, and Desire
flies off, chasing after younger girls.
Sing to me, love: pick up your lyre
and sing of a girl with violets
on her breasts, who wanders
somewhere far from here.
Sappho 140
She dies, Cytherea: gentle Adonis
is dying. What can we do?
Beat your breasts, dear girls;
tear you clothes and cry out.
Sappho 150
Cleis, it’s a sin to weep
in the house of the Muses’
servant:
this is not our way
Day and Night 52
Sappho 55
When all your stirrings,
of blood and breath cease,
and you pass through the outermost silence,
where neither remembrance of you
nor the heat of desire can puncture
once
that final hanging veil,
then (since you take no communion
with roses
where Music was born
with the Muses)
you will dart,
invisible in the House of Hades,
to and fro above the bodies,
that melt like shadow beneath you.
Departed from us.
Day and Night 53
Sappho 63
Dream of black you come
whenever sleep comes sweet
god terrible, yes, but you
have power to keep away
pain: a little hope grips me
yet that I will not share
in nothing with the blessed – I
do not
want to be
as I am:
let me have these trinkets
Day and Night 54
Stesichorus 15
Like a living thing silent
and thirsty, the arrow bites
sharp through skin and
bone, to lodge vibrating
in the middle brain,
where it buries itself
to the feathers.
Geryon’s neck
slumps gently to one side
while the blood flows black
on gore-stained limbs
and breastplate:
a trickle of petals
at summer’s end,
the poppy’s tender
glory.
Day and Night 55
Simonides VIII
If righteousness
Is a holy death
Then Fortune has smiled on us
Above all others: we fought
To crown Greece with freedom,
And now we lie here,
Undying praise
Our possession.
Simonides IX
Around their country
These men set deathless
Glory, and around themselves
The dark cloud of death.
Though dead, they live.
Their courage gives them fame
Above, and calls them back
From the halls of Hades.
Simonides XLVII
Long ago the savage god Ares
Dipped his long-barbed arrows
In the breasts of those
Who lie here, and gorged them on
Bloody droplets.
This stone memorial, touched with
dust, stands in the place
Of the spear-struck dead,
Lifeless rock
In place of the living.
Day and Night 56
Sappho 104a and b
Hesperus, you carry home the dawn
scattered sheep, home the goat
that dawn scattered. you carry home
the little child
to mother.
you are twilight lovely
evening
star.